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Doug's Diggings: Finally, high speed Internet at home!

There is always a constant struggle at our house to keep up with the latest technology and last week I think we made a big step - we acquired "high speed" Internet.

Now by most people's standards, my new Internet service is probably very average. But, like most technical problems, there is story behind my adventure.

My wife and I have had dial-up Internet service for a number of years. Of course, we both are very familiar with high-speed internet at our places of employment and are both well aware of what Internet should be.

Because of the slowness of the dial-up service, it got to the point where neither of us were willing to use the Internet at home - the slow drawing of pages, the amount of time to open a photograph - most everyone knows the dial-up routine these days.

A couple of years ago I called my telephone server, AT&T, to see if I could get high-speed internet at our house. There were many stories published about Internet (through AT&T) being installed in Hudson.

For some reason, however, the company could not serve our house. I'm not sure why I could not get service. I live in North Hudson, but maybe it's considered the outer fringes of North Hudson - I don't know. My house was built in 1973, so it seemed to me that service should be at our house - if not now, soon. I thought for sure it would come a year or two ago when they were wiring North Hudson School.

I was also encouraged a couple of years back when I made phone calls to AT&T and they said they would probably be able to serve my house in about six months.

I would check back on the AT&T Web site occasionally, but always got the same message: Service was not available at my address. Finally, I decided to call AT&T a month or so ago to try to get an answer to my question: When would high-speed Internet be available at my address?

Now you would think that AT&T, being the "phone" company, would have the ability to efficiently answer all telephone inquiries. After working through a series of voice mails, I got a human who said I would be transferred to a person who could answer my question.

Surprise - I was soon back in the voice mail system and ended up on one of those hold patterns - the one that tells me "stay on the line, my call is important." I finally hung up and never got my question answered.

Now I don't blame AT&T - the fact is, I'm the one who isn't real tech savvy and if I knew better, I could have probably solved my own problem and found a way to get a question answered. I'm sure they have their reasons for not extending service to my neighborhood - no doubt it's an expensive project.

By now, however, I decided it was time to explore other options.

I looked at some cell phone type services - they didn't look too bad, but most reasonably priced plans involved extra charges for certain amounts of uploads and downloads. I finally ended up with Comcast and shifted my telephone service and got my high-speed (at least higher speed) Internet.

I can now work at my computer at home and see items on the screen almost instantly - something most others have been doing for years.